Covid's Lessons for Climate and Inequality: From Sacrifice Zones to Justice

Resources

The global pandemic carries essential lessons as we confront the climate crisis. Among the most critical are lessons about America’s profound inequality and its disastrous consequences for the well-being of communities of color, particularly Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities. 

In the conversation “Black Lives and the Climate Crisis” and its associated blog post, we looked at the broad connections between American racial hierarchy, the maintenance of which requires racist police violence, and climate injustice. 

Today, our expert panelists in “From Sacrifice Zones to Justice” examine how racist policies of dispossession, including but not limited to redlining, housing discrimination, and concentrated toxic burdens, have harmed the physical health of communities of color; how the resulting ”sacrifice zones” have intensified the lethality of the coronavirus crisis in these communities; and what lessons we can draw for the ongoing climate crisis. In doing so, the panel imagines pathways to justice and how we can take collective action to move toward freedom and equality.

This resource page is designed to complement our panel discussion, and features work by the distinguished panelists.

Sacrifice zones

These articles provide background on the spatial expression of racist policy in Richmond, VA; Philadelphia; New York City; and the American South.  

“How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering” by Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich (The New York Times, August 2020)

“...formerly redlined neighborhoods are today 5 degrees hotter in summer, on average, than areas once favored for housing loans, with some cities seeing differences as large as 12 degrees. Redlined neighborhoods, which remain lower-income and more likely to have Black or Hispanic residents, consistently have far fewer trees and parks that help cool the air.”

“Pollution is Killing Black Americans. This Community Fought Back” by Linda Villarosa (The New York Times Magazine, July 2020)  

“Black Americans are exposed to 1.5 times as much of the sooty pollution that comes from burning fossil fuels as the population at large. This dirty air is associated with lung disease, including asthma, as well as heart disease, premature death and now Covid-19.”

 “Frontline Communities Hit Hardest by COVID-19” by Lena Afridi and Lucy Block (Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development (ANHD) Blog, April 2020) 

“The Coronavirus’s Unique Threat to the South” by Vann R. Newkirk II (The Atlantic, April 2020)

Justice: leadership from our panel’s experts

Eddie Bautista, Executive Director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance

“‘Put up or shut up’: New York forges ahead with statewide environmental justice measures” by Rachel Ramirez (Grist Magazine, June 2020)

“We got a law passed — among all accounts the most ambitious in the country, maybe the world — so now, let’s see how real these elected officials are about Black Lives Matter,” Eddie Bautista, executive director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, told Grist… “What do you do when the very air is brutalizing people?”

“Climate Justice Agenda 2020: A Critical Decade for Climate, Equity, and Health” by NYC Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC EJA, April 2020)

“Just as NYC-EJA highlighted the potential underestimation of extreme heat deaths in NYC, in order to truly understand COVID-19 disparities and where the need for support is greatest, we must fully understand which communities are being most impacted.”

Link to sign up for NYC Environmental Justice Alliance’s newsletter

Dr. Cheryl Holder, President, Florida State Medical Association; Co-chair, Florida Clinicians for Climate Action, Interim Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity, and Community Initiatives, Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, Florida International University

“The link between climate change, health and poverty” by Dr. Cheryl Holder (TEDMED, June 2020)

“An undeniable, clear and consistent warming trend is on the way. A health emergency even bigger than HIV/AIDS seems to be in the works, and it was my low-income patients that were dropping clues of what this would look like. This new epidemic is climate change, and it has a variety of health effects. Climate change impacts us in four major ways. Directly, through heat, extreme weather and pollution; through the spread of the disease; through disruption of our food and water supply; and through disruption of our emotional well-being.”

“Medical community must sound alarm about climate change’s negative effects on health” by Dr. Cheryl Holder (Miami Herald, February 2019)

“Climate change causes more extremely hot and humid days, which increases the likelihood of dehydration, heat stroke and heart attacks, and worsening conditions such as COPD and kidney disease. People who lack air conditioning or spend time outdoors — like farm and construction workers and student athletes — are more exposed and face greater risk.”

Link to sign up for Florida Clinicians for Climate Action’s Newsletter

Brentin Mock, Writer and Editor, CityLab

“Why environmentalists should support the Black Lives Matter protests” by Brentin Mock (Grist Magazine, December 2014) 

“Let’s be clear: Eric Garner was killed by a policeman, not pollution,” I fumed on social media.

And then I got the learning. Eddie Bautista, the longtime environmental justice advocate and director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, was quoted in the article saying about Garner’s death, “There are [a] number of ways that racism plays out…The asthma is just one more example.”

I thought the article used a poor occasion to illuminate racial asthma disparities. Bautista explained the larger context to me, though, saying, “The [article] doesn’t take the cops off the hook; on the contrary, it further indicts institutionalized racism in the U.S. for permeating the very air we breathe.”

“Dozens of Cities Dub Racism a Public Health Crisis” by Brentin Mock (Bloomberg CityLab, July 2020)

“These declarations are springing up right at the intersection of rage against police brutality and a legacy of racist health policies. Both have rendered Black life almost unlivable, and currently under a federal administration that has denied these concerns even exist.”

Jacqui Patterson, Director of the NAACP Climate and Environmental Justice Program

“Geopolitics of Climate Change — A Civil Rights Perspective” by Jacqueline Patterson (Remarks Given at University of California, Santa Cruz, February 2016)

“[W]e must have a radical transformation from extracting, polluting, and dominating policies and practices to regenerative, cooperative systems that uplift all rights for all people while preserving the environment upon which we all rely for our existence.

NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Resources and Toolkits

This resource guide includes a number of reports, toolkits, webinars, and information on several key campaigns.

Link to sign up for the NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program’s newsletter

Intersecting Crises: COVID-19, Climate Change, Structural Racism

“Connecting the Dots Between Environmental Injustice and the Coronavirus” Interview of Dr. Sacoby Wilson by Katherine Bagley (Yale Environment 360, May 2020) 

“One thing that Covid-19 has done, it has made a lot of populations we made invisible, visible. Nursing home populations. The meatpacking industry. Prisons. Communities impacted by environmental injustice. These are communities that we’ve thrown away. We’ve made them invisible, but Covid-19 has made them visible.”

“Covid-19 has shown that we have a lot of Haves in this country, but we have a lot more Have-Nots. Our policies have disproportionately benefited the Haves while disproportionately impacting the Have-Nots. To address the disparities in Covid-19, we have to address our structural inequalities in this country. The first place to start is race and racism.”

“There Is No Climate Justice Without Racial Justice” by Evelyn Nieves, Ilana Cohen, James Bruggers, Judy Fahys, and Marianne Lavelle (Yes Magazine, June 2020) 

“Different faith leaders were speaking out about the violence that is perpetrated against Black people in Louisville and across our country, and how that is against our values,” said the Rev. Dawn Cooley, who is executive director of Louisville-based Kentucky Interfaith Power & Light, a coalition of faith communities that advocates for action on climate change...Cooley said it is easy to find a connection between climate justice ‘and the system of racism in our country and in our world. And the same people who are struggling for their basic human rights in America and the larger world are the same people being most impacted by climate change.’”

"The United States has Become a Disaster Area” by Emma Marris (The Atlantic, September 22, 2020)

“But if we are to make the kind of sweeping systematic changes that could stop climate change from getting worse, end the truly dystopian inequities in our country, and crush the pandemic before hundreds of thousands more are dead, we cannot allow our baselines to shift. We cannot forget that these are disasters.”

Ross Gay 

About Ross Gay: www.rossgay.net/about

Poetry Foundation: www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ross-gay

Review of The Book of Delights by Ross Gay: orionmagazine.org/review/the-book-of-delights/

[Consider purchasing Dr. Gay’s work at your local independent bookstore]